This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

TTC gives new start to Russian transit expert

For a Russian immigrant, continuing his career in public transit at the TTC is a minor miracle. Michael Sosedov arrived in Toronto eight years ago without a word of English.

For Michael Sosedov, 57, becoming a TTC station manager is the latest stop on a journey that took him from behind the wheel of a Moscow bus to the helm of a transit system that dwarfs Toronto's. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

But Michael Sosedov’s life had fairy-tale elements long before he arrived eight years ago in Toronto without a word of English.

Recently Sosedov fulfilled an immigrant’s dream, launching a new career at the TTC that allows him to draw on the expertise he built up in Russia.

But his account begins even before he was born.

Sosedov’s mother, Helena, had lost five sons and a husband during the Second World War. When the war ended, she travelled from Moscow to the smaller city of Smolensk to visit the graves of her dead children.

Article Continued Below

There she fainted or fell on the street. The unconscious woman was robbed of her money and personal documents before being taken to a hospital.

For a time, the injury also robbed her of some memory. She recovered but remained stranded in Smolensk waiting for the Soviet bureaucracy to grind out new documents.

Hospital officials gave her a job working with patients suffering from memory loss and that’s when Helena got what must have been the shock of a lifetime.

Her husband, who authorities had said was presumed dead in the war, turned out to be a patient there. He had lost both his legs and suffered a series of concussions that had impaired his memory.

Helena had another son, and then 10 years later, when she was already 41, she got pregnant again. The couple hoped they would finally have a daughter to call Masha — Maria, in English. But Masha turned out to be Micha.

Fifty-seven years later, Micha — now called Michael —says his new job is no less a fairy-tale ending.

The courtly, white-haired Muscovite is the oldest of the six group station managers recruited by TTC CEO Andy Byford to help transform the
frontline customer service
.

Sosedov is also the most experienced member of that team.

His last job in Russia was as the deputy minister of transport for the Moscow region.

He began as a Moscow bus driver and worked his way up to general manager of that city’s suburban transit system, a regional network of buses and trains that carries 9.5 million riders a day. (The TTC carries 1.5 million and GO serves 259,500 most weekdays.)

Because transit agencies tend to promote from within, Sosedov says he had “a very small hope I would find any kind of job in public transit,” when he landed in Canada, following an eight-year wait for the visa.

He says he is the product of the Soviet Union’s “excellent education system” earning a PhD at no cost while working as a bus driver. But he also acknowledges the dark side of an era when everyone was poor and afraid of authority.

Sosedov was only eight when his father died of a brain tumour. Little Micha took up smoking as a way to suppress the appetite his mother couldn’t afford to feed. He didn’t quit cigarettes until he entered military service at 18.

His life has been punctuated by more than the usual series of new beginnings.

In 1980, he went to western Siberia to help build a transportation network for Russia’s oil and gas industry. He ended up spending nine years away from his family. But Sosedov said he was anything but an exile.

Siberia, he says, is “a beautiful, beautiful place,” similar to Canada’s Northwest Territories, where he was interviewed for a government job about three years after coming to Canada. He got a trip to Yellowknife but Sosedov says his poor English probably sunk the career opportunity.

After Siberia, he was sent to Armenia to help rebuild the transport infrastructure destroyed in a 1988 earthquake that killed 45,000 people.

He loved being part of an international team that included other experts from France and Italy. You have to understand, he said, “Our country was so closed we were like aliens.”

Back in Moscow, Sosedov helped implement a magnetic ticketing system he says increased fare revenues by about 300 per cent.

The system had about 100 concession fares, he said. Everyone, from victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to police and firefighters, got a free pass so there was a thriving black market for transit tickets that foundered when it was no longer easy to counterfeit fares.

“Smart technology is not just an expensive toy, it’s a tool,” said Sosedov, who is now in charge of the stations on the Sheppard line and those from St. Clair to Finch.

He’s anxious to begin building a new team to take ownership of the look and ambience of those
TTC
facilities.

“We spend most of our life at work so it’s very important to have a great relationship inside our
team
,” said Sosedov, who has four children and one granddaughter and, lives with his wife and youngest daughter in a condo near St. Clair, one of the stations now under his care.

A careful speaker, Sosedov still reaches for the English vocabulary he worked to build at every course he could access during the first three years he lived in Toronto.

“To understand the Canadian mentality it’s important to know English,” he said.

But Russian or Canadian, said Sosedov, “I understand everyone wants to be heard and valued.”

Clarification - May 1, 2013:
This article was edited from a previous version to clarify that the ticketing system that Michael Sosedov helped implement in Moscow increased fare revenues by 300 per cent.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com